What would you say if someone told you that, religiously speaking, there was no discernible moral difference between same-sex marriage and murder?

The comparison seems so ridiculous, so over-the-top and nasty, no thinking person could truly hold such a view. That kind of thinking belongs to the unenlightened and fearful Bronze Age, doesn’t it?

Maybe so. But it also belongs to St. Catharines regional councillor Andrew Petrowski, whom I interviewed Wednesday on the subject of gay marriage.

He framed his view on the matter in stark terms:

“You can’t stand for the Christian faith and say you are pro same-sex marriage, because Christianity deems marriage to be between a man and woman. It’s simple,” he said.

“If you are now going to say, ‘I believe in murder and I call myself a Christian,’ that would be perverted. That would be twisted. It’s the same thing, the same concept.”

This is the honestly held position of a man who represents more than 130,000 citizens at regional council.

He makes no apologies for it. He will quote scripture to demonstrate the authenticity of his view.

He bears no ill will toward homosexuals, he said. He loves them, in fact.

But they cannot marry because, just like homicide, it is against the rules of his chosen deity.

I came to call Petrowski after I stumbled across his June 27 tweet about gay marriage and U.S. President Barack Obama.

He linked to a video showing Obama singing Amazing Grace at the funeral of South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney.

Petrowski comments in the tweet: “Obama singing ‘Amazing Grace’ the day he condones same-sex marriage. Talk about a perverted mind?!”

The tweet went largely unnoticed for the last two weeks because the councillor has only a handful of people following his account.

So I called Petrowski to ask him to explain his posting.

His response was straight out of the textbook of right wing, American-style evangelical Christianity.

Marriage is a Christian, God-decreed “sacred bond between a man and a woman,” he said. Therefore, to sing a Christian hymn as Obama did in a church service while supporting gay marriage is a terrible blasphemy.

In Petrowski’s view it is a such a contradiction, he labelled it perverted — to which he said he means “twisted.”

He later e-mailed me Bible passages (Romans 3:23 and Matthew 17:17) to support the Biblical authenticity of his view.

There is just a staggering amount of rhetoric to unpack here, including the odious comparison between homicide and gay marriage. But it got even worse when I asked him how he thought the citizens of St. Catharines would react to his tweet.

After all, I said, he represents more than 130,000 people, some of whom will be married, gay Christians. If they go into a church and sing Amazing Grace would they, by Petrowski’s own logic, also be holding a “perverted” or “twisted” point of view just like Obama?

He didn’t answer the question, but said he didn’t care what a gay couple sang in church. He was only commenting on what Obama sang.

Could he at least understand, based on that tweet, that a gay Christian in St. Catharines could quite easily think Petrowski was labelling them as perverted, I asked.

Again, I was wrong. God loves gay people, Petrowski said. He loves gay people. They could even have “civil unions.”

But to be married is a violation of the almighty’s commandments.

Finally, I asked Petrowski if he thought the views of his constituency should be more important than his own, given that he represents a diverse, multicutural community.

He said no, they aren’t. Given the sheer diversity of the community, that would be an impossible task, he said.

“Look, I could have a bunch of people in the community who think we should start a ground war with ISIS. I don’t have to reflect that viewpoint,” he said.

Moreover, as a regional councillor in Niagara he doesn’t vote on issues of gay marriage or national defence.

On this point, Petrowski is indeed correct. Regional council does not decide the legality of same-sex marriage. And he has his constitutional right to free speech.

But what he cannot see through his Jesus-tinted glasses is that this isn’t about the extent of the regional government’s powers.

It is about treating his fellow citizens, the ones who elected him, with basic decency.

When an elected official calls supporting same-sex marriage “perverted,” he is promoting prejudice toward the gay community. He is saying gay marriage is illegitimate, that gay, married Christians live with a twisted cognitive dissonance and are not really Christians at all.

For a believer, to accept same-sex marriage is the same as accepting murder after all.

He can say “I love the sinner but hate the sin” all he wants. That doesn’t undo the damage of his tweet.

Consider for a moment how thin his justifications are if you replace the words “same-sex marriage” with “black” or “Jew.”

In his e-mails to me after the interview, Petrowski railed against what he assumed would be this column’s “anti-Christian vitriol,” because I am an atheist, as if that has anything to do with the issue.

What should be noted is that his take on Christianity isn’t some authoritative interpretation.

For centuries, the devout have come to radically different conclusions on the same subject. The Quakers of the 18th and 19th centuries, for instance, were ardent abolitionists based upon their reading of the Bible. Most of their fellow Americans found support for slavery in the same book and could quote chapter and verse to make the matter clear.

For many a believer, support for gay marriage can be found in the Bible. Like most believers, including fundamentalists, they take their Bible a la carte, accepting and interpreting what they like, dismissing what they don’t.

Petrowski says he has a right to his religious views and a right to voice it as a politician. And so he does.

But saying “it’s my religion” is not an inoculating agent against criticism, nor does it blunt the overt impact such bigoted comments have.

He is indeed free to say what he likes. And we who recognize and defend the rights of our gay brothers and sisters, who believe all citizens are equal under the law, can voice our disgust with Petrowski’s views and question whether this man is fit to govern at all.